Something Less Than a Lollapalooza / This year's festival boasts Metallica but not much more

JOEL SELVIN, Chronicle Pop Music Critic

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, August 3, 1996

Whether Lollapalooza '96 amounts to anything more than Metallica with a bunch of opening acts remains to be seen. The producers may want to believe otherwise, but little evidence to support that point of view could be found yesterday at San Jose State's Spartan Stadium.

Sure, there were no fewer than 17 other bands appearing on three stages and various other trappings of festivity scattered around the college football stadium, which holds 35,000. But the aura of the world's most popular hard-rock band floated over the entire day like one of those massive balloons in Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

What Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction dreamed of as a traveling cultural rock circus in 1991, when Lollapalooza first took to the road, became little more than a Metallica concert this year. Rock bands playing the secondary stages, who vied desperately to get the shot, found themselves performing in front of a few dozen indifferent festivalgoers.

Fans arrived slowly throughout the day, reaching a peak of 25,000 only in time for the day's penultimate act, Soundgarden, the only other authentic attraction of the day besides Metallica.

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But who co-opted whom? The producers certainly used Metallica's prodigious box-office power. And Metallica, with few worlds left to conquer, can use the alternative credibility of headlining a festival whose past top acts have included such certified alternative rock icons as Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Smashing Pumpkins, Primus and Sonic Youth.

The program at Spartan Stadium hardly represented the breadth and diversity of past years, with ska-punkers Rancid sharing the main stage with virtual oldies but goodies from Devo, still whimsical in their matching plastic yellow suits, and the Ramones, in an encore engagement after the band's farewell tour earlier this year.

The young crowd looked like a tattoo convention, stripped to their shirt sleeves in the broiling afternoon heat. Security guards had to stop fistfights in front of the stage, and tawdry behavior appeared to be the order of the day.

An array of cheesy arts and crafts, along with the typical overpriced fast-food fare, was available near the two auxiliary stages adjacent to the stadium decorated with circus tents and plastic inflat ables. No fewer than three different tables sold sunglasses.

Nobody cared about most of the acts appearing on the smaller stages, largely new bands with one or two albums out. Although the stages were right next to each other, sometimes bands started sets on one stage while the ones on the other stages were still playing -- a real battle of the bands.

The festive atmosphere that could be found in abundance earlier this week at the H.O.R.D.E. and Furthur concerts was nowhere in evidence. Bands didn't sit in with each other, unless Lemmy of Mo torhead flying in to join Metallica for an encore counted. The only off-the-wall act of the day was the kung fu experts from China, the Shaolin Monks, who demonstrated their remarkable martial arts prowess on both the main and secondary stages.

Perhaps the producers opted for the easy sales of Metallica without making the extra effort to broaden the scope of the proceedings of an event that reflected the true diversity of today's rock. The alternative rock scene itself may have reached a static point where the new, exciting acts have not struck a resonant enough chord with the record-buying public to support a summer tour as ambitious as past Lollapaloozas.

But, judging from the approach of commercial concerns represented at the fest -- from condom manufacturers handing out free samples to the giant inflatable running shoe prominently displayed beside the second stage -- they don't see the alternative world as a subculture, but just another market.